Anonymous Routing for Mobile Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are particularly vulnerable due to their fundamental characteristics such as an open medium, dynamic topology, distributed cooperation, and constrained capability. Location information of nodes can be critical in wireless ad hoc networks, especially in those deployed for military purposes. In this paper, we present two Protocols for anonymous routing to prevent location disclosure attacks. The Protocol for Anonymous Routing (PAR) guarantees absolute anonymity, which itself might cause problems as it would become hard to identify malicious and misbehaving nodes. PAR-Enhanced trades off some anonymity to enable detection of malicious and misbehaving nodes.

Keywords:

• Location Disclosure Protection
• Anonymity
• Security
• Ad Hoc Networks

Notes

∗The node that is a neighbor of the receiver and that is also in the path of the established connection, knows the identity of the receiver, but it would not be able to distinguish the receiver from any other next hop node.

∗This time Th depends on the diameter of the network and could be set to the maximum Round Trip Time that could be possible in the network between any two nodes.

^†INA field is set only when a corresponding route reply packet is received.

∗Only FID is considered in deciding if a route request is a duplicate or not.

∗The signature can be constructed by encrypting the node address, hash of the packet with the node's private key.

∗In case of an ideal channel, overhearing can be assumed. But, in case this cannot be assumed, then the nodes explicitly transmit TV' to be verified by the next node in the path.